THEODORA ALLEN Press Highlights
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THEODORA ALLEN Press Highlights 509 West 27th Street New York NY 10001 + 1 212 563 4474 kasmingallery.com ARTIST THEODORA ALLEN EMBRACES THE ELEMENTS AT KASMIN GALLERY A.G. Wollen February 7, 2019 Installation view of Theodora Allen 'Weald' at Kasmin, January 24 - March 9, 2019. Photography by Diego Flores. In Theodora Allen’s paintings, weeds grow, translucent but stubborn. The plants themselves are drawn with scientific precision, specimen-like. While so many paintings these days announce themselves as artworks, bellowing their contemporaneity, her works seem almost like artifacts, remnants of something simultaneously here and not here—like a glassy Xerox of an ancient illuminated manuscript. They are what I imagine I’d find inside Hildegard von Bingen’s dream journal, if she were born in California in 1985. In the first room of her show “weald” at Kasmin Gallery, seven plants look sun-bleached onto diaphanous blue shields, crests for the invisible. These plants, in Allen’s words, are all “narcotics, or destabilizers, or medicinal”— there’s your now iconographic marijuana leaf, next to your stinking nightshade, your wild poppy—but also “they are all survivalist plants. They thrive in poor soil, they don’t need a lot of water.” I respond, “The kind of plants that take over old castles.” Allen quickly jokes: “Or freeway overpasses.” The fortress of long-fallen monarchies on a misty moor, or the intersection where the 134 freeway meets the 2, concrete woven like lace. That is where Allen’s work lives, in the barely-there distinction between the ruined and the waiting to be. The second room holds four large paintings that depict the four central symbols of the original tarot from the 15th century, suspended within a classical window motif: half portal, half bell jar. But the objects are discarded, disembodied, overgrown by the same ecosystem of plants she previously catalogued. Tendrils curl around the edges of the image; petals fall from frame. 509 West 27th Street New York NY 10001 + 1 212 563 4474 kasmingallery.com Allen’s Shield (Marijuana), 2018. Courtesy of the artist and Kasmin Gallery. Allen’s process, too, mirrors this liminal space. First, she describes how she leaves “a pool of watercolor which I let evaporate on the canvas. Dependent on climate and weather conditions, the water evaporates at different rates.” The watercolor marks the time of making and is incorporated into the drawing itself: a crack in the stone, a vein of a leaf. Then, Allen builds her hyper-detailed image with layers of oil paint, simultaneously stripping what she has put down as she goes along: “I just add and remove, essentially making and unmaking. It’s like coaxing the image into this place, in between forming and disappearing.” Eventually, the fabric of the canvas starts to wear, resisting the tide- pull of rhythmic application and erasure. Allen embraces what she calls “the un-wieldiness of the materials,” but usually, when an artist commits to letting organic conditions dictate the shape of the work, they end up in deep abstraction, not the realm of botanical illustration. But Allen is persistently figurative, however evanescent. The references of the show—the medieval iconography, Pre-Raphaelite mythos, fin de siècle filigree, 1970s psychedelia—are all historical moments where artists pulled the past up to meet them, as the end of the world seemed newly within reach. But here, each apocalypse blurs in the blue of twilight. The world continues. Her haunting pharmakon blooms, no matter the soil. 509 West 27th Street New York NY 10001 + 1 212 563 4474 kasmingallery.com Theodora Allen’s Ghostly Paintings Hark Back to the Middle Ages Margaret Andersen January 30, 2019 Viewing myths and fairytales from a Humanist perspective, the American painter’s latest body of ethereal works reference the plants that contributed to the first widely used anaesthetics, as well as weeds and wildflowers in her native LA. Margaret Andersen visits her in the sunny Pasadena studio where she lives and works. A shield for protection; a cup to replenish; a weapon to fight. These allegorical symbols are at the centre of artist Theodora Allen’s recent work and debut New York solo exhibition, weald, on show now at Kasmin Gallery. Part 509 West 27th Street New York NY 10001 + 1 212 563 4474 kasmingallery.com landscape, part mind-scape, Allen’s otherworldly oil paintings evoke that twilight state of consciousness between waking and dreaming with her use of archetypal imagery and lush, psychotropic plant life. I visit Allen at her studio tucked away against the sunny hillsides of northeast Los Angeles, where we talk about her creative process and why the white noise that comes from living by the freeway actually sounds like the ocean, when you think about it. You were born and raised in LA. Has that environment impacted the way you approach your work? I think definitely the quality of light has a major influence that runs through my work, since my paintings focus on revealing that light source through layers of sheer colour without the use of applied white. But I feel like the California sunshine affects everybody’s experience of this city: even just in the sun-bleached quality of posters and books that you see in the windows of shops, or in the way the city’s been recorded through photography, there’s a certain light that’s in everything. Botanical elements are a recurring theme in your work. Is access to nature important to you for inspiration, or are these purely imagined landscapes of the mind? I think it’s both. One of the amazing things about living in LA is that you can be in a city and then in ten minutes be in a canyon or be by the ocean. A lot of the imagery for these paintings came out of the research I was doing at the Arboretum’s Botanical Library. There’s always a period before I start working where I just spend time gathering information and imagery and mapping everything out. I’m inspired by weeds and wildflowers, things that aren’t necessarily rarefied plants. You’ll 509 West 27th Street New York NY 10001 + 1 212 563 4474 kasmingallery.com see them growing in your backyard or on the side of a freeway overpass. There’s an accessibility and a sense of the ordinary in a lot of these plants; however, for this upcoming show I chose to focus on plants from around the world that transcend the commonplace in their use as remedies and aphrodisiacs and sacraments. Tell us a little bit about your studio space and neighbourhood—how do your physical surroundings influence your process? I found a very industrial space to work in right out of grad school but it never really felt like the right environment for me. So after a year of being there I started looking for a more domestic space where I could live and work. I found a small mid-century home here in Pasadena. It’s tiny but it has a lower level with an open floor plan and a lot of natural light. There’s not a lot of wall space though, so right before a show it becomes an extremely dense, salon-style workspace. What is it like living and working in such a suburban part of the city? It’s a very peaceful place to call home. My street is very quiet, and my neighbours are mostly older retired people. The house is situated at the top of the hill so I can sit out on my balcony and get an amazing view of the city. Pasadena is strange in that it feels far away from things but also still part of the world. Maybe it’s the fact that the freeway is so nearby. At first it really bothered me but I actually feel like I’ve come to appreciate it being there; it feels quintessentially LA that within all its disparate communities the freeways are what connects to the rest of the city. When I first moved in I was complaining about the constant white noise of the cars to a friend, but she said “Just pretend it’s the ocean.” That really changed my perspective! 509 West 27th Street New York NY 10001 + 1 212 563 4474 kasmingallery.com What’s the physical process of achieving that ethereal quality in your paintings like? For this show I took a slightly different approach from my usual process. I started with pools of watercolour and just left the pigments where they naturally wanted to run to the edges of the canvas, so when they dried it would leave this organic, watery stain. When applying oil to watercolour there’s a material resistance, which isn’t easy to control and it brings an elemental quality to the work. The linen that I paint on then becomes very atmospheric, almost like a twinkling, celestial sky. 509 West 27th Street New York NY 10001 + 1 212 563 4474 kasmingallery.com Another part of the process involved putting down very fine layers of oil paint and then wiping it away before it dried and so you get almost a ghost image in the texture of the linen. It’s something that I developed just through trial and error but it started out because I was making a lot of painting experiments and not wanting to ever just leave things as is, so there was a lot of wiping away and painting into previous layers, allowing traces of those former images to get left behind. And then I just found that it really resonated with a lot of the themes I was exploring, and it was interesting to see the physical evidence of making and removing and the process of time.